Crowdsourcing with Smartphones

This 2012 article focuses on crowd-sourced information and particularly the use of crowdsourcing applications on smartphones. The article demonstrates three in-house applications deployed in a novel cloud consisting of over 40 Android devices in a SmartLab at the University of Cyprus. The applications and devices provided an open testbed to facilitate the authors’ research and the development of applications on smartphones. The article presents the intrinsic characteristics of smartphones through a taxonomy that classified the emerging field of mobile crowdsourcing with their three applications, which optimized location-based search and similarity services over data generated by the cloud. The exercise used three applications: SmartTrace+ enables similarity matching between a given pattern and the trajectories of smartphone users, keeping the target trajectories private; Crowdcast enables location-based interaction by efficiently calculating the nearest neighbours for each user at all times; SmartP2P optimizes energy, time and recall of search in a mobile social community for objects generated by a crowd.

This article will be of use to PVE researchers and practitioners interested in collecting crowd-sourced information and data using smartphones. It will be especially useful for those planning to test smartphone applications by conducting cloud-based experiments. The authors argue that smartphones can unlock the full potential of crowdsourcing capabilities, as they allow users to contribute complex and novel problem solving.